Wilderness Tips Read Free Page A

friendly, she is cautious about expressing approval in words. “Fair” is her best compliment. When the others talk about what they’ve read or what subjects they will take next year at university, she is silent.
    But she knows other things, hidden things. Secrets. And these other things are older, and on some level more important. More fundamental. Closer to the bone.
    Or so thinks Joanne, who has a bad habit of novelizing.
    Outside the window Darce and Perry stroll by, herding a group of campers. Joanne recognizes a few of them: Donny, Monty. It’s hard to remember the campers by name. They’re just a crowd of indistinguishable, usually grimy young boys who have to be fed three times a day, whose crusts and crumbs and rinds have to be cleaned up afterwards. The counsellors call them Grubbies.
    But some stand out. Donny is tall for his age, all elbows and spindly knees, with huge deep-blue eyes; even when he’s swearing – they all swear during meals, furtively but also loudly enough so that the waitresses can hear them – it’s more like a meditation, or more like a question, as if he’s trying the words out, tasting them. Montyon the other hand is like a miniature forty-five-year-old: his shoulders already have a businessman’s slump, his paunch is fully formed. He walks with a pompous little strut. Joanne thinks he’s hilarious.
    Right now he’s carrying a broom with five rolls of toilet paper threaded onto the handle. All the boys are: they’re on Bog Duty, sweeping out the outhouses, replacing the paper. Joanne wonders what they do with the used sanitary napkins in the brown paper bag in the waitresses’ private outhouse. She can imagine the remarks.
    “Company … halt!” shouts Darce. The group shambles to a stop in front of the window. “Present … arms!” The brooms are raised, the ends of the toilet-paper rolls fluttering in the breeze like flags. The girls laugh and wave.
    Monty’s salute is half-hearted: this is well beneath his dignity. He may rent out his binoculars – that story is all over camp, by now – but he has no interest in using them himself. He has made that known.
Not on these girls
, he says, implying higher tastes.
    Darce himself gives a comic salute, then marches his bunch away. The singing in the kitchen has stopped; the topic among the waitresses is now the counsellors. Darce is the best, the most admired, the most desirable. His teeth are the whitest, his hair the blondest, his grin the sexiest. In the counsellors’ rec hall, where they go every night after the dishes are done, after they’ve changed out of their blue uniforms into their jeans and pullovers, after the campers have been inserted into their beds for the night, he has flirted with each one of them in turn. So who was he really saluting?
    “It was me,” says Pat, joking. “Don’t I wish.”
    “Dream on,” says Liz.
    “It was Hil,” says Stephanie loyally. But Joanne knows it wasn’t. It wasn’t her, either. It was Ronette. They all suspect it. None of them says it.
    “Perry likes Jo,” says Sandy.
    “Does not,” says Joanne. She has given out that she has aboyfriend already and is therefore exempt from these contests. Half of this is true: she has a boyfriend. This summer he has a job as a salad chef on the Canadian National, running back and forth across the continent. She pictures him standing at the back of the train, on the caboose, smoking a cigarette between bouts of salad-making, watching the country slide away behind him. He writes her letters, in blue ball-point pen, on lined paper.
My first night on the Prairies
, he writes.
It’s magnificent – all that land and sky. The sunsets are unbelievable
. Then there’s a line across the page and a new date, and he gets to the Rockies. Joanne resents it a little that he raves on about places she’s never been. It seems to her a kind of male showing-off: he’s footloose. He closes with
Wish you were here
and several X’s and O’s.